There's something like a line of gold thread running through a man's words when he talks to his daughter, and gradually over the y...ears it gets to be long enough for you pick up in your hands and weave into a cloth that feels like love itself. It's another thing, though, to hold up that cloth for inspection.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Once also it was my business to go in search of the relics of a human body, mangled by sharks, which had just been cast up, a week... after a wreck, having got the direction from a lighthouse: I should find it a mile or two distant over the sand, a dozen rods from the water, covered with a cloth, by a stick stuck up. I expected that I must look very narrowly to find so small an object, but the sandy beach, half a mile wide, and stretching farther than the eye could reach, was so perfectly smooth and bare, and the mirage toward the sea so magnifying, that when I was half a mile distant the insignificant sliver which marked the spot looked like a bleached spar, and the relics were conspicuous as if they lay in state on that sandy plain, or a generation had labored to pile up their cairn there. Close at hand they were simply some bones with a little flesh adhering to them, in fact only a slight inequality in the sweep of the shore. There was nothing at all remarkable about them, and they were singularly inoffensive both to the senses and the imagination. But as I stood there they grew more and more imposing. They were alone with the beach and the sea, whose hollow roar seemed addressed to them, and I was impressed as if there was an understanding between them and the ocean which necessarily left me out, with my snivelling sympathies. That dead body had taken possession of the shore, and reigned over it as no living one could, in the name of a certain majesty which belonged to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Under the spell of moonlight, music, flowers or the cut and smell of good tweeds, I sometimes feel the divine urge for an hour, a ...day or maybe a week. Then it is gone an my interest returns to corn pone and mustard greens, or rubbing a paragraph with a soft cloth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It was in fact an old battle and hunting ground through which we had been floating, the ancient dwelling-place of a race of hunter...s and warriors.... Pawtucket and Wamesit, where the Indians, where the Indians resorted in the fishing season, are now Lowell, the city of spindles and Manchester of America, which sends its cotton cloth round the globe. Even we youthful voyagers had spent a part of our lives in the village of Chelmsford, when the present city, whose bells we heard, was its obscure north district only, and the giant weaver was not yet fairly born. So old are we; so young is it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

They give us a pair of cloth shorts twice a year for all our clothing. When we work in the sugar mills and catch our finger in the... millstone, they cut off our hand; when we try to run away, they cut off our leg: both things have happened to me. It is at this price that you eat sugar in Europe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I was a countryman and a father before I was a writer on political subjects.... Born and bred up in the sweet air myself, I was re...solved that [my children] should be bred up in it too.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in band...s of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »